September 17, 2009

What kind of book is this?

A set of questions which will help you determine (perhaps from the blurb alone!) just what genre you're about to read.

The premise:

Don’t you see that car fishtailing up the road, barely staying on the pavement? It’s heading straight to the cliff, zooming like the brakes have been cut, and it seems that in just a few seconds it will crash to certain doom. We may have just enough time to figure out what kind of a novel we are in …

If the driver is the local aristocrat that everyone in the village hates and has reason to kill, this is a cosy.

If the driver is a young punk who has just realized, too late, that the beautiful woman he slept with last night had no intention of sharing the dough with him, this is a noir.

And so on.

Go, read. The author (Rob Lopresti) had a lot of fun with it.

via Library Thing

Posted by Linkmeister at September 17, 2009 12:01 AM | TrackBack
Comments

"If it turns out the driver died for no reason and everyone spends the rest of the book feeling very, very sad about it, this is mainstream literature."

And that, I'm sorry to say, is why I (an English major) only read detective stories, science fiction and magical fantasy...

I had a lot of fun with it too.

Posted by: hedera at September 17, 2009 09:04 AM

Nothing like a good laugh to get the day started.

Thanks for sharing this with us. :-)

Posted by: Illanoy Gal at September 17, 2009 11:07 AM